Guest post by John Hunter, author of the Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog.
This webcast shows Bill Bellows’ presentation, Do You See What I See, at the 2012 Annual Deming Conference. Bill is now the Deputy Director of The W. Edwards Deming Institute®.
I previously posted on a snippet from this presentation: How Did We Do on the Test?.
As long as we do an investigation of the root cause, and there is only 1 root cause of course*, as long as we can eliminate that root cause then we will only have good parts and that is the model.
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A Boeing airplane, or rocket engine, is not a bunch of parts that fly in close formation. But that [view] is how the organizations are managed.
Of course, he doesn’t believe there is only 1 root cause for every problem. For more about systems thinking and root causes see: Stratify Data to Hone in on Special Causes of Problems and Root Cause, Interactions, Robustness and Design of Experiments.
In the presentation Bill discusses how important viewing the organization as system is to creating solutions that work in a world with variation. The taguchi loss function illustrates the weakness of managing with a focus on conformance to specifications. Unless the entire system is managed the overall system is sub-optimized do to the individual components of the organization seeking to optimize their portion (silo management).
Related: Reflections from Dr. Deming on a Foundation for Leading – Using Deming’s Management Methods to Enhance the Application of Taguchi’s Ideas (Bill on the Deming Podcast) – Drawing Lines